Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

QUERY REFINEMENTS

Query refinements are the queries searchers type in after doing an initial search. They might do these refinements right away (without clicking on results) or after visiting a few pages and then returning to the search engine. Searchers often enter refinements when the initial search doesn’t provide satisfactory results, but the results do provide clues on what to search for.4

For instance, if someone does a search for a high school name and gets a set of results with that high school name but not the correct one, the searcher might notice that the results that appear have geographic information and add that to the query. [South High School] might be refined to [South High School Bakersfield CA].

Why do searchers refine their queries? An August 2009 Hitwise study about Canadian searchers found that searches were successful only 70 percent of the time and the rest of the time searchers had to “re-search to find relevant results.”5

In this particular study, Hitwise found that the lack of relevance might stem from the international nature of the searches. Since the searches were conducted in North America in English, search engines seemed to weigh U.S. sites more heavily. So, for instance, a search for a particular retail store in Canada might produce results for U.S. store locations.

A Penn State researcher found that 22 percent of queries are refined. At the beginning of a search, searchers narrow their queries, and then as the search progresses, searchers reformulate ...